1961 BMW R50 - Greg Tracy Edition

1961 BMW R50 - Greg Tracy Edition

Back in 2013, while building the first CB450 Charity bike, I get a random call (I normally don't answer unknown numbers... for some reason I did this time) and its from Greg Tracy. Let me brag about him for a moment. This man is who won Pikes Peak on the Ducati Multistrada and is now the reason why Ducati even has a 'Pikes Peak' special edition and is also the best looking paint job from the factory. He is a family man who is an extreme auto racer (really anything with wheels and a motor) and stunt man. He runs his own successful Automotive website that highlights many important events and stories. Well, somehow we got lucky and crossed paths on social media. He found out about our Charity build and did a whole write up for his website. To say the least, I was honored and we were able to raise a lot of money for St. Jude that first year.

Fast forward to 2016, he now wants a bike built by us... was NOT expecting that! He asked if we could build his 1961 BMW R50 that he had shipped to us.

These bikes are no longer cheap to restore if you can even find the parts. We found that this bike was originally black. But Greg wanted a vibrant Navy Blue to pay tribute to his local Navy station in California as well as show his love for his friends at the local Yacht club by putting a gold leaf flag on the tank (hand done by Tanner Leaser in Fort Worth TX, as well as all the cream white pin stripe).

So back to the colors, these bikes were always one solid color, frame and body. So we decided to go back to the original black frame that it was born with and paint only the body navy blue, that way if he ever wanted a 100 point original, he can easily take the body parts off and paint them black instead of having to take it back down to the frame.

We opened the container and there were enough parts to build two of these! After we did an inventory check, we noticed that one of the bikes was non matching and missing most of its parts but the other was a numbers matching bike (and Greg also forgot that he had both bikes haha). So we set out to restore that one. We used the other one to pick parts off of and ordered the rest of the parts that we needed form around the world.

After she was all finished, we took the bike up to Perry Bushong, also in Fort Worth, to have him tune the carbs for our 100 mile test drive. (This was the last time I saw Perry before he passed: RIP. He was a badass... look him up) This bike starts with one very easy kick!

So Greg, she is all ready for you!

And if you get so busy that you don't every pick it up - well that's OK too :-)

He wanted a beautiful rich brown leather seat so we took the seat frame from the other parts bike and had our friends at Xtreme Uphaulstry in Denton TX mold a new seat. We still have the original, again if he ever wants to go back) which is a black molded rubber.